2013 — 20 December: Friday
Well, the terminator1 has more or less completed its sweep past Eastleigh (or is that Helios driving his chariot of the sun?), a nearly full moon is visible low in a pink northern sky, the front porch thermometer is insisting it's +3C despite the frosty coating everywhere, and the vital first cuppa is at hand.
I feel no urge...
... to go off adventuring just yet.
Pause for thought
Five years ago, I was bewailing (mildly) the discovery that I had some 13,000 emails salted away. Yes, you guessed it: my archive of the things is an ongoing (or should that be "offstalling"?) process made psychologically even less enticing by the knowledge that the total is now a bit higher. In fact, 52,754 as reported by Copernic a couple of minutes ago. I'm (reasonably) sure that is doubleplusungood counting the things since I've now downloaded all the Google cloud emails somewhere into my only recently re-instated Thunderbird system for 'offline' working.
Not that I work on them offline — or, indeed, do any work whatsoever — but that seemed the easiest way of keeping local copies around. I began using Googlemail (behind the scenes) at the start of 2010; emails earlier than that seem largely unnecessary, somehow. As I recently remarked to my chum Val in Stockholm:
Although I still feel less than inclined to trust the "cloud" with aspects of my digitised life (though at least I can derive some comfort from the thought that the NSA would in all probability keep a secure backup copy of it, whether I asked them to or not) I am finding the steady accretion of stuff on my PC yields continuing amusement, even if I find myself more dependent these days on my Copernic desktop search tool to find anything.
For (random) example, I'd mentioned "mimosa" in an email to my chum Carol in New York just over a decade ago. It came up, obliquely, as I was gently prodding at yet another web package and/or content management tool (Peter will keep trying to persuade me to get more automated) a couple of weeks ago. I do look at all his suggestions, but have yet to adopt any of them for much longer than five minutes or so. "Or so" is sometimes nearer 10 seconds.
The "All Mail" folder in Thunderbird suggests a mere 19,784. I haven't bothered to tot up all its separate subfolders. Life's too short. And, besides, it's time for breakfast.
I bought the...
... only dictionary of American English I felt I needed — Robert L Chapman's 1986 New Dictionary of American Slang — on one of the pleasant diversions into Oxford en route to see dear Mama in May 1988:
On the way up to my mother this Saturday we stopped in Oxford for the bookshops (that was my price) and I picked up a great dictionary of American slang to slot alongside Partridge's Dictionary of slang and unconventional English. It's a hoot. A 320-mile round trip (I know that's nothing in America, but it very nearly gets you to Scotland from where we live!) for the sake of four hours of uninteresting (and basically uninterested) conversation about people and events I know not wot of. Look that up in your F&W! Christa simply cannot understand that my mother means very little to me (since her mother means a lot to her). Perhaps it's different for ladies?
Hey! I'm having great fun reading Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. Confession time: I bought the first volume back in 1980 but, what with the move, the change of job, parenthood, somehow overlooked it at the time. Well, I started it on Friday, and was sufficiently taken with it by the time of our Saturday arrival in Oxford to pick up all three successor titles. There's little enough on the surface to tie a Southampton straight recluse to a San Franciscan extrovert gay... But I heartily recommend it (except that you're probably way ahead of me!)
I don't much care for the font used in the Chapman. But at least it's still somewhere in the house, which is more than I can now say for Eric Partridge's rather more magisterial 1961 tome. That set me back £20 in 1983. I do still have a copy of his Dictionary of Forces' slang 1939-1945 (a first edition, too, from 1948). And I recently re-read the entire set of Maupin's Tales which now sprawl deliciously over eight volumes.
Why all this talk about American words? Simple, I found this today:
Now, here's...
... something you don't see every day. A new, lossless data compression technique taking ideas from the way the fovea centralis works and the sort of anamorphic transformations I first read about quite some while ago. (Link.)
And something else!
The Tolkien-inspired GCHQ Xmas card...
... and its verse:
Two terabytes per day to retain all Google searches Five keeps the content from surveillance perches Seven for Skype when one speaks to mates Twelve stores the traffic which flows to the States And in the darkness where the watchers are Few laws to obey; nor rules that bar And for privacy let the protection die In a secret state where the shadows lie.
One can only hope it's genuine.
Considerably later
I'm back from Gill & Chris, stuffed with good food, good chat, and in good time to catch "World on 3". A bit of rain, and quite a bit of wind, but far less traffic at this time than a week ago on the same road. (The A34, mostly.) They said they'd be battening down the hatches for Xmas as soon as I'd left, so I tried not to outstay my welcome :-)
Oops
If I read this correctly, it's almost the polar opposite of the sad situation outlined in Hal Draper's 1961 SF short story MS Fnd in a Lbry.
We're doomed, I tell you... all doomed.